Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature

<p>Hope and modernism are two words that are not commonly linked. Moving from much-discussed negative affects to positive forms of feeling <i>Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature</i> argues that they should be. This book contends that much of modernist writing and thought reveals a deeply held confidence about the future one premised on the social power of art itself. In chapters ranging across a diverse array of canonical writers – Henry James D.W. Griffith H.D. Melvin Tolson and Samuel Beckett – this text locates in their works an optimism linked by a common faith in the necessity of artistic practice for cultural survival. In this way the famously self-attentive nature of modernism becomes a means for its central thinkers and artists of reflecting on what DeJong calls aesthetic utility: the unpredictable ungovernable capacity of the work of art to shape the future even while envisioning it.</p>